As any reasonable beer aficionado will recognize, the idea of highlighting a beer taste of the decade is absurd. There are so many wonderful flavours out there, I admit, that even the Taste of the Month sometimes leaves me scratching my head in befuddlement, much less the annual Taste of the Year. A Taste of the Decade would appear nothing less than impossible.
Still, it seems right to mark World of Beer's tenth anniversary with a taste of some sort, so I've decided to highlight what I think has been both one of the best and worst developments to hit brewing in the past decade: Wood.
It is, of course, the way all beer was once kept - in wooden barrels carefully maintained by a house cooper - and is still is the way certain classic styles maintain their distinctive characters, such as Flemish red ales and lambics. But once stainless steel tanks came into play, wooden barrels appeared to have no further significant place in the brewing world.
But of late there has been a revival of wood-aging in brewing, specifically in North America and some parts of Europe. In the hands of able brewers who can gauge how much wood influence should be present, barrels formerly occupied by chardonnay wine, bourbon or even other beers can bestow upon a brew magnificent qualities, to my tasting experience most recently evident in the wonderful Allagash Interlude from Maine. But of course, the opposite may also be true, where the influence of oak or the bourbon the cask once held can utterly dominate a brew to the point of it original character becoming almost non-existent.
In the last few years, however, I've got to say that the good has outnumbered the bad in the realm of oak. So, for good or for evil, my Taste of the Decade is wood-influenced beer.
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